Rube Goldberg Synchronicity

This week we Hosler’s rediscovered our love of Rube Goldberg devices. It has been a long, lasting love even if we don’t write as often as we should. Although Goldberg intending his “time saving” devices to be commentaries on an increasingly technologically dependent society (and I get that), I also see them as meditations on the the intrinsic creative aspects of both art and science.

Max and Jack can trace their fascination with these devices to the Road Runner cartoons I’ve forced them to watch since a very early age. This supplemented their intrinsic interest in how things work. To fuel that interest I got this excellent collection of Goldberg strips.

They so inspired Max that he began constructing his own elaborate devices. Here’s one he did when he was six. I used in a talk I gave about science and art.

Goldberg (trained as an engineer) is especially interesting to me because he represents another interesting science/art hybrid like Santiago Ramon t Cajal or Osamu Tezuka. Anyway, our interest in wacky machines was reawakened when I came across the following OK Go video for their song “This too Shall Pass.”

That blew our minds and we watched it a zillion times. We even downloaded the song. The next day (this is the synchronicity part) I made my monthly trek to the Comic Swap in State College where I discovered Jason Shiga’s “Meanwhile” (FYI, I also picked-up the terrific European comic album “My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill”). As he mentions here, Shiga was inspired by a choose-your-own-path comic in Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics.”

I didn’t tell the boys about “Meanwhile” for awhile because I wanted to check it out for myself. Frankly, it is insane. Wonderful and fun, but clearly the work of a deranged mind. The amount of work it must have required fills me existential dread. The story snakes through the book, constantly splitting-off, offering the reader alternative storylines full of secret codes, adventure, disaster and, on one path at least, a happy ending. I’m glad I took some time with it before I told the boys about it, because I haven’t seen it since. Everyone should buy this book.

See? Crazy. Each panel is connected to the next by a thin tube that sometimes splits and can take you forward or backward in the book depending on which one you choose.

As I type this, I am also reminded of similarly complex animations I saw recently on the blog Drawn! If “Meanwhile” left me feeling inadequate, imagine what I felt like after watching these…

parkour motion reel from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.

videogioco-loop experiment from milkyeyes on Vimeo.